While I lack the experience to tell you whether or not I agree with them, I can say that I enjoyed this 5.5 hour Wagnerian behemoth a lot more than expected, and that it stimulated not only my eyes and ears but my brain. No, we did not nip to New York for the weekend. I've finally made it to my first Live in HD from The Met cinema screening.
This is a great way to see opera. Sure, you miss the sense of occasion of a real performance. The Odeon Guildford is a far cry from the Royal Opera House. But you get big, comfy seats, a great sound system, and all the action on a jumbo screen with excellent camera work. This lets you see facial expressions and subtle movements, revealing that there's marvellous acting to go with those big voices. With two, 40-minute intermissions we were even able to bring in a nice picnic and some wine.
The comfortable environment was helpful, because Parsifal is challenging. It's long, generally moves at a glacial pace and deals with complicated themes (including some disturbing anti-semitism that modern directors do their best to minimise).
The opera starts with a nearly two-hour first act that is mostly one character, the old Grail Knight Gurnemanz, filling us in on the backstory. A wannabe hero, rejected by the grail knights, turns into an evil sorcerer hell-bent on destroying the guys who rejected him. He does this by luring Grail Knights to his castle, filled with temptresses who seduce them and then turn them into sex-enslaved zombies who fight against their former colleagues. The current chief kight barely escaped, but not before giving in to his carnal desires once, and getting wounded with his chain mail down. That wound now refuses to heal and, basically, the order of knights and all of civilisation is going to hell in a handbasket because of his mistake. This is sexy stuff, and would be amazing delivered in a Lord of the Rings style flashback by Peter Jackson. But Wagner gives it to us in stately, dramatic 19th century aria with magical strings and lots of repetition. It's beautiful, but ... even though Rene Pape's voice is powerful, rich and absoluely beguiling, my record of napping through at least a bit of every Wagner opera I've seen remains unbroken.
Act 2 is a blockbuster and, frankly, worth sitting through the rest of it for. You can view a sample here. Our young hero Parsifal has decided to save the day by taking out the sorcerer Klingsor. He gets distracted by the army of seductresses, and almost gets seduced by the mysterious Kundry, who does all sorts of Freudian manipulation exploiting Parsifal's maternal issues. (The director really plays this up; you could build a whole university psych class around it.) But Parsifal resists, kills the evil sorcerer and gets back the holy spear that's going to cure the chief knight. This is good stuff, which fascinates, interests and repels you in equal measure. The Met's production drove the spooky horror home, doing the whole scene in a pool of blood with those seductresses all in innocent white, getting progressively blood-spattered and sexual as the act went on. Evgeny Nikitin's Klingsor was one of the most frighteningly evil characters I've ever seen on a stage, with sticky blood dripping through his hair and a voice that raises menace in your soul.
In Act 3 an exhausted Parsifal, Kaufmann's every muscle sagging with weariness, finally makes it back to the Grail Knights after years of wandering. Thank God Wagner didn't decide to dramatise those, or we'd have been there all weekend. He cures the king, takes his place, redeems the temptress Kundry and generally saves the day. Again, we could accomplished all this in half the time that Wagner takes, but the combined quality of singing and acting holds your attention.
Much as I love the intimate setting of the Longborough Festival, where we've seen our Wagner live, it does make a difference when you throw all the Met's money at it. Kauffman is an operatic superstar who combines his exquisite voice with great acting. Katarina Dalayman is, according to the New York reviewers, the definitive Kundry these days, and she presented a compellingly believeable bad girl wanting to be good. Peter Mattei's Amfortas, the chief knight, had you feeling the pain of that un-healing wound, half believing he was going to actually die on stage.
That cash also funds blockbuster sets, particularly Klingsor's castle with its oppressive cliffs and blood-soaked floors. The Grail Knights' home was a bit too modern for me, with cracked earth rising to a horizon, a stream (sometimes water, sometimes blood) down the middle and striking images of sky, planets and landscapes projected on the massive screen that formed the back of the stage. But it certainly did get across the idea of a land withering and dying along with Amfortas. Nor was I particularly captivated by the choice of costuming the knights in modern business trousers and white shirts. Though I understand the attempt to relate eternal themes to the modern age, I like my knights in chain mail. These modern touches, however, stayed on the right side of challenging, being striking and interesting without becoming ugly, or eclipsing the drama.
Parsifal did nothing to change my usual opinions about Wagner: The man needed editing, and I want to see staging by Peter Jackson. But I can see the appeal, and I was delighted to be able to experience such an amazing performance, with such a starry cast. It leaves me very, very excited that I hold tickets to see Jonas Kauffman in Don Carlo at the Royal Opera House in May.
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